Thank you, Chair.
At these committees we try not to get into partisan issues. This committee is pretty good at that. I usually save mine for late-night debates with Mr. Komarnicki in the House of Commons, and he gives as good as he gets.
I want to talk a little bit about the social transfer. Rene, I think you mentioned an increase.
Some of the organizations that have long been advocating for significant investments in social infrastructure organizations, like the CCPA, the Caledon Institute, and CCSD, have talked about the social transfer. Back in the 1990s the government of the day bundled the social transfer, health, and social services. We took health out back in 2004.
I think there's somebody here from the CCPA in the audience.
I think one of the things in the alternate budget was $2 billion for investment in the social transfer--Nova Scotia, for example. Ed's right that we've been putting a little bit more money into the social transfer, but I don't think it's a matter of incrementally adjusting that. It's a matter of redoing it and making it significant. In Nova Scotia we've seen $4-a-month increases in social assistance. What is that item? That doesn't make any difference. That's just an increase for the sake of saying it's an increase.
The other thing I wanted to say is there's a preference, and I'll leave it to you. We have great inequities in equalities province to province. Some provinces do much better in a lot of different things. But certainly on the social assistance side, the Province of Quebec has invested in providing more access of opportunity in a number of ways.
I'd like to ask you--perhaps, Rene, starting with you--to just expand a bit on the idea of an increase in the social transfer. It may be an unfair question. Do you have any sense of what it would take in Nova Scotia, for example? Do you have a specific number in mind? Or, more generally, how would we maximize the social transfer from the federal government to the provinces? That's what we're trying to do in this committee, to come up with recommendations for the federal government.